


all my heroes are going to heaven

by myliobatis



Series: highwomen [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Force Ghosts, Gen, Healing, Humor, Metaphysics, ghost jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:06:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22343785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myliobatis/pseuds/myliobatis
Summary: After the war, it's just Rey and the desert... and a lot of opinionated ghosts.
Series: highwomen [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608331
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45





	all my heroes are going to heaven

"You know,” Rey says, burying her face in her hands, “when I said ‘be with me’, I didn’t mean _all the time_.”

-

When the voices had called out to her on Exegol, Rey hadn’t had time to think about anything beyond relief, and a powerful drive to see Palpatine dead ( _really_ dead). Later, she had figured that access to the wisdom of the entire old Order could only be an advantage.

What she most certainly had not expected was how _annoying_ they all are.

At the moment, for example, at least three ghosts are standing around watching her practice with her new saber. And criticizing.

“--never liked Ataru, too flashy--”

“--hardly even call it that, I don’t know _what_ he was teaching them--”

“--your guard! An emphasis on offense does _not_ mean you can forget defense--”

“--since when are _you_ a master of Form IV? Your instructions are complete nonsense--”

“--shame we lost all of the instructional holos when the Temple was destroyed, it would keep you lot from ruining her technique--”

The commentary is not exactly helpful; distracted, she misses, and the training droid burns a neat hole through her leggings, stinging the skin underneath. Rey sighs, and deactivates the droid and her saber. That’s quite enough of that for today.

“Thank you, masters,” she grumbles. “ _Very_ helpful. At least the holos wouldn't complain!”

She means the comment for herself, despite her observers, so it takes Rey by surprise when the-ghost-who’s-always-frowning (she despairs of ever learning all of their names) says, “I have an idea about that,” and vanishes.

Rey doesn’t know where they go when they do that. Into the Force? None of them seem to know either; asking only gets her a lot of oblique philosophical debate and no real answers. There isn’t any sign of the possibly-helpful ghost returning any time soon, so she heads for the ‘fresher to scrub off the sweat and sand from her practice session.

When she opens the door into her living area, freshly washed, she comes nose-to-nose with the ghost of an elderly human woman, and screams out of sheer surprise.

Rey is immediately embarrassed, but the ghost doesn’t seem to mind. Instead she inclines her head politely and says “I am Master Jocasta Nu, Head Archivist of the Jedi Temple.”

Automatically, Rey tips her head in return and introduces herself. Master Nu smiles. “I believe you requested access to our collection of holos?”

Rey frowns. “I thought the Archives were destroyed.”

“My dear,” Master Nu sighs. “What kind of archive does not have _backups_?”

-

“Well, why don’t I go through it again?”

“The lesson? Or the wall? Because if you can all manifest wherever you like, I _really_ don’t understand why you keep coming through the walls.”

“...Trust in the Force, young one.”

-

Rey is cooking dinner, such as it is, when three ghosts materialize sitting at the tiny kitchen table.

“Where do you _come_ from?” she asks them, more out of habit than anything else.

“The Force, I assume,” Master Gallia says dryly. Rey is astonished when that appears to be the end of her sentence. None of the ghosts have ever answered the question in less than fifteen standard minutes before.

“ _Are_ you one with the Force now, then?” Rey asks. She’s not passing up the opportunity to discuss this with someone less prone to pontificating until they bore even themselves.

“Nobody quite knows,” Master Unduli says, frowning a little. “It is still a matter of some debate whether our existence in this form is a reward for our devotion or a punishment for our failures, or if it is something else entirely.”

“Debate,” Master Secura scoffs. “You mean we’ve been having the same fight over and over again for half a century. At least when we were alive the Council changed the subject once in a while.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Rey interjects.

“Oh, I’m quite sure we’re capable of arguing for millennia, given the chance,” Master Gallia says, eyebrows raised.

“Not _that_ ,” Rey mutters. Repeated experience has made it clear that the ghosts will happily carry on until she forcibly interrupts them. “How would you even be able to tell whether it’s a reward or a punishment?”

“It is a matter of opinion,” Master Unduli replies. “A few of the Jedi had made a study in life of how to retain some level of consciousness after death, and for them it seems a reward. For those who believe that we truly become one with the Force in death, without separate consciousness, this is a sort of purgatory between life and death, and so appears to be a punishment.”

“Well… do you like it?” Rey asks. “None of you seem too upset about being underfoot all day.”

She resolutely isn’t thinking about her own exile here on Tatooine, about the warring desires to discover her own future in solitude and to repent for her own failures. About how she’s supposed to make a new Force tradition altogether. About how she’s supposed to teach, when it feels as though she has so much more to learn. About how, some days, it feels just about impossible to do any of those things.

“We certainly didn’t enjoy witnessing the return of the Sith lord that got us all murdered in the first place,” Master Gallia says archly.

“We _did_ enjoy watching him die for good, though,” Master Secura says. Her smile is unnervingly feral.

“I wasn’t exactly thrilled about him either,” Rey reminds them. “Other than that, though?”

“It is… nice. To have a student again,” Master Gallia says, to a hum of agreement that seems to come from the room itself. 

And maybe it’s enough for now to have a teacher again - or rather, more teachers than any one being could ever need.

(Even though they can’t agree on _anything_.)

-

_Also, we have some questions about your new, more transparent friends:_

_Why do ghosts like to ride in elevators? Because it raises their spirits!_

_Why are ghosts terrible liars? You can see right through them!_

_Why didn’t the ghost go to the party? She had no-body to go with!_

Rey puts down her latest message from Poe and Finn and Rose and laughs so hard she cries.

-

In retrospect, it’s not surprising that they want her attention. After all, the vast majority of the ghosts have been stuck with nobody but each other for company for the last fifty-odd years, and she gets the impression that their conversations can be somewhat… circular.

That said, Rey would really, really prefer that they leave her alone right now.

It’s been exactly a year since Exegol, and all she wants to do is drown the memories of _literally dying_ in a bottle of the horrible moonshine they brew here. (She’s afraid to ask what they brew it _from_ ). She definitely does not want to listen to half a dozen ghosts argue about attachment, and yet somehow it’s happening anyways.

On the other hand, maybe it was a bit optimistic to think any of the _ghosts_ would be sympathetic to her feelings about her death. Her own demise was, after all, only temporary.

“Have you ever heard anyone say that if you love something, you ought to let it go? It is the same principle as ours.” Master Unduli, ever the scholar, has provided a steady stream of philosophical arguments, though they’re starting to get somewhat heated. “The problem with attachment is not _love_. It is the desire to keep whoever or whatever it is you love.” 

Rey had always had the impression that the Jedi attitude to this particular part of life was “no, none, not ever”. As it turns out, they like to argue about this as much as they like to argue about every other subject known to the galaxy, and they’ve been doing just that for the last half hour. 

“Oh, yes, as though half the Order - half the karking _Council_! - wasn’t having problems with that by the end of the war, _honestly_ \--” Ahsoka-who-is-not-a-Jedi retorts.

 _That_ snaps Rey out of her maudlin haze, and she stares back at them. “You mean - but I thought this discussion was aca-... acade-... you know, not really real.” 

Hm. Maybe the mysterious moonshine is affecting her more than she’d thought. There wasn’t much room for intelligent conversation on Jakku, but she doesn’t remember being _this_ inarticulate.

“Well, of course. We were a religious order made up of beings, and most beings have feelings of some variety. It wasn’t bred into us. Letting go of attachment is a choice.” That’s Master Billaba; all Rey knows about her is that she was some sort of prodigy of serene wisdom, and she’s certainly showing it now. She’s the only ghost who seems remotely calm.

“As though the Council set the question to the rest of the Temple before the Sith used it to _kill us_ \--” grumbles Master Secura.

“Yes, that particular incident is a good argument for… what is it they say on Cerea? ‘Love makes you crazy’?” Master Gallia this time, whose usual composure is somewhat undermined by the words coming out of her mouth.

“ _Unhealthy_ attachment, not love! He has told us himself that he fell because he could not bear the thought of his wife's death--” And Master Ti, who is startlingly liberal on this issue for a Councillor. 

“Well maybe if you’d all gotten over yourselves long enough to admit that he wasn’t alone in that, it would have been different!” Ahsoka cries.

“ _Stop_ ,” Rey nearly shouts. If they insist on having this fight right now, at her kitchen table, she reckons she deserves the interesting details too. “Go back. _Council_ attachments?”

There’s an uncomfortable pause, in which they all discover that beings without bodies can still shuffle awkwardly.

“...I thought of the clones as my own sons,” Master Ti volunteers eventually. 

Rey blinks. That’s disappointingly unsalacious. Actually, it’s sort of tragic. “Weren’t there an awful lot of them?”

She smiles a little sadly. “Several million. I oversaw their training. Over time I came to love them dearly, for all that I was not supposed to. I suppose that I was lucky that my death was not at their hands, as it was for so many of our Order.”

 _Force_. Make that _really_ tragic.

“Sorry, kid, but most of these stories are going to be pretty depressing,” Ahsoka says wryly. “You are talking to ghosts, after all.”

“Well, maybe not _all_ depressing,” Master Secura says, a teasing smile at the corner of her mouth. “There are some fun ones too. Like the time you got caught--”

“ _No_ ,” and that was at least three ghosts at once, including a voice she’s sure wasn’t there before; Rey’s head is starting to spin, and not just from the moonshine. She looks around at them, eyebrows creeping up her forehead in a silent question.

“Casual sex is not attachment,” Ahsoka supplies helpfully. “Plenty of that going around, you know, had to release the stress of the war somehow. _Un_ casual sex, on the other hand...”

“I thought you were monks.” The bottle is almost empty, and Rey eyes it mournfully. Whatever she’d envisioned for tonight, it hadn’t involved renowned Jedi masters holding forth on _this_ sort of sparring.

That gets her a round of uproarious laughter, and the ghosts start recounting stories that make Rey’s cheeks burn more than the twin suns. She’s not a _prude_ , but there’s a long way between blushing over holding hands and wanting to listen to your mentors detail their youthful (and not-so-youthful) indiscretions.

Looking away awkwardly, Rey realizes with a surge of relief that it’s full dark outside. Both suns are down, and the evening has slipped past without her noticing. She levers herself up from the table and - hells - almost falls back down again before managing to weave her way to the ‘fresher and bed.

When she falls asleep, Rey isn’t thinking about Exegol even a little bit; the ghosts grin at each other with the satisfaction of a plan well-executed, and fade out of view.

-

“--like some horrible thing you’d find under a rock in a cave--”

“--probably smelled of wet bantha--”

“--don’t even _want_ to know what the rest of him looked like under that robe--”

Rey grew up in a spaceport full of extremely unpleasant people, and she never heard anything _half_ as nasty, creative, or anatomically improbable as what the ghosts say about Palpatine when she testifies about him to the brand-new Senate.

-

(So maybe the ghosts aren’t so bad after all.)

**Author's Note:**

> \- Title and general concept from [Heaven Is A Honky Tonk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaOUbxa05FE), with which it wound up having almost nothing in common except that they're both about what your heroes do in the afterlife. This was supposed to be 100% ghost jokes, but somehow turned into an unholy combination of Rey's healing post-TROS and the ghost jokes. Oops.
> 
> -Thanks to my sister for betaing this and saving it from some inadvisable vague dialogue! Also for listening to me yammer about ghosts for fully three weeks.
> 
> \- The really silly jokes from the message were from [here](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/best-halloween-jokes-bad-puns-13512209).
> 
> \- I firmly believe that after the Kamino Incident, Jocasta Nu made a whole whack of archive backups and stashed them in increasingly unlikely places, which allowed at least some to survive long enough for Rey to get to them. You don't get to be Head Archivist by being casual about data integrity and backups, especially once you've been shown a problem!! (Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is related to my actual job.)
> 
> \- Accounts of Shaak Ti's death are somewhat... contradictory, but as far as I can tell, none of them involve any clones.
> 
> \- I couldn't quite work Barriss into any of these scenes, but in my heart she's the extra voice, desperately hoping that Aayla doesn't tell the story of that time she and Ahsoka got caught making out in the Temple gardens.


End file.
